


Ten Thousand Days

by Kypros



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Childhood Memories, Dubious Morality, F/M, Gen, Strained Relationships, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 08:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5701687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben is ten years old when his father tells him that he is too bitter for his pale complexion and windswept hair. Ben is ten years old when his mother tells him that he shouldn’t be so vicious, trying for kind and almost getting there but always coming up short. Ben is ten years old when he closes his eyes to dream and there is sharpness out of nowhere that he sees in vivid lucidity—a hot, red saber resting against the curve of his cheek, melting his skin and Ben is melting, Ben is crying, Ben is screaming (but no sound comes out)—</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Thousand Days

Ben is.

Ben is ten years old when his father tells him that he is too bitter for his pale complexion and windswept hair. Ben is ten years old when his mother tells him that he shouldn’t be so vicious, trying for kind and almost getting there but always coming up short. Ben is ten years old when he closes his eyes to dream and there is sharpness out of nowhere that he sees in vivid lucidity—a hot, red saber resting against the curve of his cheek, melting his skin and Ben is melting, Ben is crying, Ben is screaming (but no sound comes out)—

 _I am coming for you,_ the voice says.

With forced evenness and great frustration Ben is told that he is too young to feel lost, suffocating in nothingness and breathing in bitterness for naught as though everything that his life has never been or will be does not mean anything to anyone and never will. It doesn’t matter that when he closes his eyes that there are voices that speak to him, disquieting and hot. In this way, his Uncle is just so disappointing in the emotional sense and Ben realizes that he too is broken in himself, too used to familiar tragedy to be very open. Ben does not believe his Uncle when he says that they are not meant to be tools and the truth lodges bitter tasting in his throat at the sign of every memory and mantra that his Uncle espouses about peace and knowledge and serenity and harmony. He says this all through tranquil albeit disquieted blue, blue eyes.

Ben is twelve and he knows that all tools are meant to be broken, and he believes that his Uncle prefers this to be later rather than sooner. The months—years—decades it takes a Jedi to soak in the blood of their own personal tragedy merely gives them time, and with this Ben also knows that every one of them falls into the same crude trap of vying between the balance. His Uncle just wants him to have that innocence of not knowing for as long as possible—happiness, like he barely remembers—and Ben is.

Ben is fourteen and he is a member of a scattered family, a veteran of broken ties, flapping in the wind. Ben is the one who is left behind, still staring in astonishment and fury at the empty skies of the space port when his father breaks yet another promise and the strange, flat bleakness, the utter embodiment of _lost_ returns and it is overwhelming—like he is not who and where he was meant to be. Ben is the one who pours himself into quiet meditation, slipping fluidly through the void as he tries to quell the reverberating disquiet he feels at the center of his very core every time his Uncle lies to him, a disquiet that flows slowly albeit steadily through his veins and froths forth in anger within the moments he feels an emptiness bringing itself forth into the galaxy and Ben, well Ben is.

And then the war starts and Ben is the one who is there for every rib cage hollowing loss his mother endures in the Senate, and he is there for every newfangled desperation his father invents when the man tries to pretend that another galactic conflict is not happening _again_ , and he is the one who was still never really in the midst of all the action, too sheltered by his new life with his Uncle and the lies, lies, _lies_. Still, he is fifteen and he himself does not lie and expounds to all who will listen that with every loss and fleeting chasm of anxiety and desolation panging from his family in void, that he can somehow feel it in his bones, in his heart and in his mind.

Ben is nearly sixteen and he is the one that most people forget who was still there at all.

Then, Ben is done and he is tired and he is no longer Ben.

\--- 

He is selfish. He is selfish little bastard who wants nothing more than the memory of what he’s done to slip away into the roiling anger that skitters beneath the surface of his skin like deadened ashes, choking him in earnest. He wants the memory to disintegrate into the nothingness that he’s lost in, to fade into the void. And the longing is undeserved, but it doesn’t matter anyways, because it’s not like he can have it. He has always longed for things he cannot have, like the warmth of a friends smile and the gentleness of peace and serenity—wishing for a place within him that was not gray and snapping with all the bitterness of salty sea air.

 _Them_. He wants them—all of those children, wide eyed and furious in the face of death—back and he wants fresh air. Because in this moment of pre-dawn drowning, he is full of regret. He has been suffocating ever since that moment (remember this: four years ago, eight months, two days, eleven hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty-six fucking seconds) and he has finally slipped beneath the surface. He is nineteen years old and he has finally discovered his own personal tragedy—and wouldn’t his Uncle be so sad?—but it doesn’t end here. 

The children that he slaughtered use to intone in quiet murmurs about the godliness of serenity and somewhere along those lines, a convoluted story about the ethics of the Code that didn’t believe in fell straight in his hands (his head) about the peace that power brought. He prayed to God once—not god—but God. He begged him to stop the shadows that moved in the darkness and to stymie the fear and anxiety that bubbled over the vents of his rib cage, spilling out in blinding whites and hot reds. But even praying couldn’t fix it, because God wasn’t there—there was only the Force—and Ben didn’t have a single soul to hold him close and whisper in his ears: “Nothing will ever happen to you. I promise I will keep you safe. It will be okay.”

He supposed it didn’t matter. Even if it did, they couldn’t fix this anyways.

\---

   
And later on a date that is unimportant, he finds that after all these years that he is still full of longing. It never really goes away, and he plies desperately for things he cannot have like the cool warmth of a childhood summer breeze touching his cheeks with the gentleness of a mother’s hand, and wishing for skinned knees and sticky fingers and dirty toes from running barefoot in the grass.       

He wants sunlight. He wants fresh air.

He wants the cool Nagakashi River at night outside the towering skylines of Coruscant where there are no men and no woman and no fighting—a place where you can slip beneath its cold, murky surface and live forever, free of tiredness and free of bitterness and free of anger and Ben—no wait, Kylo Ren is.

But he is older now and that doesn’t matter. Things he has longed for have come and gone but they are not special in the ways that they should be. They weren’t obtained in the right way. There has never been anything so wrong in the ways that they have come to him. And tonight—

Tonight he is supposed to kill a girl—a scavenger, a weakness—and pretend that he is a normal human being who does not care about the repercussions of death and murder and the voices that he hears in his head incessantly and endlessly and for always. He won't, though. He can't.

And as he watches the ferocious red of his blade clash against her own, the light in itself reflecting in the hollows of other human's faces, he feels gloriously alive but also guilty and anxious. Bitter and lost.

 _I am here_ , says the voice. _It is me_. The voice is different from before and Ben is there when he feels it—the pull (it's always been there, ebbing and flowing in a forever disquieting cyclical manner, burrowing furrows into the tracks of his mind)—and he knows that there will always something there, brilliantly shining, calling out to him, just forever out of his reach.

  
\--- 

He wakes up one morning and supposes that he should be bothered by his complacency—by his complete inability to not do anything about his constant weakness—staring dead-faced at a man, who like his Uncle has lied to him, and about his smiles which only show teeth and gums and about killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent people, because power has not brought him peace— _but wait._

Let’s try this again.

What bothers him (what really bothers him) is this:

He has a choice. Every breath is a choice. Waking every morning, bowing down to avarice and malice and bending his neck in defeat—those are choices. He is surrounded by them. There is a choice, gilded and made thick and ancient by it’s finality, but it offers pacification, and it is always there. He could walk away. He doesn’t. He stays silent and lets things happen (he drifts in and out of Nagakashi river, where people dip below the surface and live forever) and he stays.

\---

When he sees her again, he remembers the girl differently. The girl was once hugeness and weakness—a furious rage that slipped in and out of his every breath—but now she was something else. Something he could not name. When he reaches out to her, he thinks he might feel it—that longing for quietness within him that he has long tried to quell through atrocity and rage and it’s as if her very being is the answer. He tries desperately with elaborate lies to sway her towards him, lies about things that had never happened—like how the darkness had brought him great power and great truths and great serenity—but her bright, burning eyes never believe him, not once, not ever. They meet again and again and after a while, he stops trying. After some time he stops trying to lie about what was really going on.

“ _I don’t know what to do_ —,”

He tells her this desperately in the midst of his saber swinging dangerously close to her neck.

It creates a silence between them that is marred with the unspoken reminder that he was not in fact Kylo Ren, but instead still a ten year old little boy lost to forgotten viciousness and the hollow void of mitigating confusion. He was lost to bitterness. Lost to nothingness. Lost to suffocation and great frustration and idiosyncratic foolishness. Because the truth was he was not powerful like he wanted to be—power had never brought him anything close to balance—and despite pretending that he was impervious to weakness, in those final moments of his father’s life, he had been crying. He had later pulled at pain in his chest with desperate fingers that tugged at last threadbare of his mind—make it stop, make it stop—and when nothing did, he knew.

"I can help you—," the girl says and he is tempted, so very tempted, but he thinks he may feel like his father now (clinging to desperation and sharpness and denial) and so he can only snarl.

The voice finds him: _why don't you ever listen?_ But he has listened to the voices his whole—but this voice, the new voice feels saddened and desperate. And suddenly, very sharply, his mind is flooded with an overwhelming brilliance that chokes out the ashes that had settled heavy in his veins, suffocating him throughout the years with outright resentment and deadened anger. The conflagration grows in size and heat and he feels as though he is choking, outright dying, and his skin feels hot and he tries to call out to it: " _Stop!_ " for this too is just as bad as bitterness.

Unable to think, he swings his saber listlessly at the girl, but he finds that he is unable to see. He thinks he hears her calling out to him (Ben— _Ben_ ) but wait—

 _You can't help me_ , he thinks. _I can't even help myself._

He inhales sharply, closing his eyes and suddenly someone is touching him, digging fierce fingers into the ply of his skin. The touch alone burns in its entirety and he drops his saber from the sharp and unexpected contact alone.

He finds however, just as quickly as it had appeared, the blinding brilliance that had been consuming him dissipates into the void.

" _Rey_ ," he breathes heavily, and the disquiet in his very being is silenced and for once he feels nothing inside of him at all. Not a single thing. 

\---  

And later, much later, the girl asks him: "Do you think that some people are just born sad?"  

Ben is twenty-eight or maybe thirty-three or maybe just thirty and he is tired. He is tired of running on anger. He is tired of running on bitterness. It is a bitterness that has long since become his life, and Ben is ready to let go of the anger and the hatred and the grudges and the insanity. He is so tired and has been for a long time and he has since decided that he is at the point that, yes, he is ready to forgive himself for letting the scavenger save him. It takes a long time, but he is very willing now to lay aside life-long burdens. He has decided that yes, he is willing to invalidate all of his past actions by not caring anymore. He cannot decide what this actually means to him.

Ben is.

Ben is thirty-three and learning how to very professionally not mind anything that has ever destroyed his dreams or hurt him or even stung his pride.

Ben is a former Jedi. Former Sith. Former member of the First Order. Former student, former son, former traitor, and Ben is tired of mourning for all of the things that he only ever briefly tasted and lusted for and spent a long time performing atrocious acts to protect.

Ben is.

Ben is tired and when he looks at her, he realizes that he cannot answer her, not because he can’t, but because he doesn’t want to.

The girl—Rey—fiddles with hem of her robe before biting her lip. Then: "I can’t be with you if you're just going to kill yourself in ten years."

Ben opens his mouth and then closes it.  _Then go_ , he wants to say and he knows that if she does, the disquiet will return. Rey just pulls him closer.  
  
(It’s too much now. He cannot do this. He hasn’t told her that yet. He doesn’t suppose he ever will).

Ben is thirty-three when he chooses Rey. It is his first real choice ever. Beyond this he does not know what else do to, but knows he will not—cannot—look back. He will deal with the aftermath of his personal failings later. He will figure this out (he is not a stupid boy; he is far from stupid and never has been) and he will stop the viciousness inside of him and Ben, Ben is. 


End file.
